ja2v113hamfandomcom-20200214-history
Customizable Facilities
HAM 3.4 and 3.5 offer new features for increasing the importance of Sector Facilities. HAM 3.5 externalized the entire system, allowing modders and players to move facilities around, and even create entirely new ones! Principles and History It is virtually impossible to explain Facilities at all without some sort of example. This is because most people may not have even been aware of their existance! Yes, they're very subtle things. Therefore, I'll start with the example, and we'll move on from there. JA2 1.13 - The Alma Gun Range JA2 1.13 has an INI setting called "GUN_RANGE_TRAINING_BONUS". It's a very old setting, and some people may have missed it entirely. What this setting does is to give a bonus that improves the Marksmanship Training speed, but only for characters training at the Gun Range. In other words, when training at the Gun Range, characters will gain Marksmanship faster. This works with any kind of Marksmanship Training, including both Practice (alone) and Study (with a trainer). The Gun Range was the first actual facility in the game, added in the early days of JA2 1.13. There is one such Gun Range on the map, which is in Alma sector H13. But why take my word for it? You can see the Gun Range effect IN-GAME for yourself: So... what IS a Facility? By its simplest definition, a Facility is any structure inside the sector that has the potential to increase (or decrease) the effectiveness of tasks performed in that sector. The Gun Range is a structure that exists in sector Alma H13 (you can see it yourself, it's in one of the rooms inside the building, on the north-western side). It increases the effectiveness of Marksmanship training carried out in that sector. Therefore, it is a facility. But yes, this is a very simplified definition, and one that HAM proceeded to expand, far beyond its humble beginnings. HAM 3.3 - Old Facilities, New Meaning By using this logic, we can identify several such "Facilities" in other sectors of the map. For instance: #A Hospital (in Cambria) #A Factory (in Grumm) With a little bit of creativity, it's easy to think up some possible effects that these facilities might have. HAM 3.3 implements two such ideas: *The Hospital in Cambria can increase the effectiveness of Medical training, just like the Gun Range does at Alma. After all, it is fully equipped with lots of medical gear, has a lot of patients to examine, and experienced Doctors loitering about. *The Factory in Grumm can increase the effectiveness of repairing items. After all, the queen used it to create munitions and firearms, so it definitely has the heavy machinery required for such a task. That is, assuming the repairer merc has some understanding about how such machinery works. HAM 3.3 goes so far as to offer INI settings for both these facilities, so you can control how much of a bonus you'll get from them. Already, this makes sectors H2 and F8 (Factory and Hospital) very important to control. Facilities are designed to affect the Strategic Game, as these two hopefully do. HAM 3.4 - Moving and Duplicating Facilities Once HAM 3 demostrated the potential that lies in Facilities, HAM 3.4 went to work to release them from the strong hard-coded ties they had to their original locations. It's about time for an important revelation: A Facility is just a bonus. It is NOT the actual structure you see when visiting the sector in Tactical mode. You can use the Map Editor to erase the entire military base from Alma H13, leaving nothing but trees, and you'll STILL get the Marksmanship Training bonus there. The bonus is tied to the specific sector, not to the actual physical structure located on the sector map. Of course, if you do erase the sector map, it makes no sense to have a bonus there, so they ARE tied together concenptually, but not physically. Now, imagine that you use the Map Editor to edit San Mona Mine, and add a couple of shooting targets there - maybe make a "Tony's Gun Emporium" with a nice professional shooting range for paying customers nestled in the back room. Logic says that if characters get better training at the Alma Gun Range, they should also be able to use this new San Mona Gun Range to improve their marksmanship training. To this end, you'll need to COPY the training bonus from H13 to D4, so you get the same bonus in both sectors. HAM 3.4 allows you to do this. In fact, you can copy the training effect to anywhere you want. Heck, you can put a Gun Range in every sector on the map if that's your fancy. And the same thing goes for the Hospital and Factory bonuses provided by HAM 3.3. If you want, you could also remove the Gun Range Bonus from Alma H13. Perhaps you have a mod that changes Alma to a quiet sea-side shanty town with no gun range in sight. You can easily remove the Gun Range Bonus from there entirely, and you don't even have to place it anywhere else if you don't want to. The next, obvious step But moving facilities about doesn't sound like much of a feature. It has limited use, seeing as how we're restricted to only 3 different facility types. This is where HAM 3.5 comes in, making the facility system an extremely important tool, and opening up a ton of potential for the Jagged Alliance 2 Strategic game. HAM 3.5 - Do-It-Yourself Facilities So HAM 3.3 gave us two new facilities to play with. And HAM 3.4 allowed us to move them around. But the potential for Facilities is far greater, and HAM 3.5 taps that potential. With HAM 3.5, players can create their OWN, BRAND-NEW FACILITIES, and place them anywhere they want. This adds an entirely new moddable feature, which allows changing the way that the Jagged Alliance 2 Strategic game is played. It allows modders to create sectors that have more flavour to them, and affect the entire progress of the campaign. HAM 3.5 adds a plethora of options to decide what each facility does, and how it affects your mercs and your strategic decisions. Demo Facilities To demonstrate the potential of the new facility system, HAM 3.5 presents no less than 4 new facility types, and even adds new effects to some of the existing ones. Here is the concise list of all Facilites available in HAM 3.5, and the effect that these facilities have on gameplay. This is just a handful of possibilities. Using the full range of modifiers made available by HAM 3.5, you can probably come up with lots of new facilities yourself. And you can place them wherever you want. FacilityTypes.XML This new XML file allows us to define new types of facilities. Using different tags, we can add as many bonuses/penalties to a facility type as we would like. This allows creating a whole range of facilities with different functions and purposes. Facility Modifiers in HAM 3.5 :Main Article: ''[[XML Facility Modifiers|''XML Facility Modifiers]] HAM 3.5's new XML allows combining all sorts of modifiers for new (or existing) Facilities. Many more are planned for the future, but in the meanwhile the selection is already much greater than what we had in JA2 1.13 or even HAM 3.4. Here is the concise list of modifiers available in HAM 3.5. For a more thorough description, please visit the main article (see link above). These are just the options in HAM 3.5. Future versions of HAM will probably contain even more modifiers, including potential risk of attribute loss or injury, extra costs to use a facility, and even mine income modifiers. Be Careful If you plan to move facilities around, or make new ones of your own, you should first read the article about XML Facility Modifiers thoroughly. This is important mainly in the event that two facilities with similar or related modifiers are placed in the same sector. The interaction that occurs is hard-coded for now, meaning you can have unexpected results when trying this. Normally, however, placing two facilities in the same sector that do NOT share similar bonuses should have no problem with one another. HAM 3.6 - Super Duper XML externalization : Main article: FacilityTypes.XML in HAM 3.6 Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, HAM 3.6 takes the facility system to the ultimate next level. HAM 3.6 expands the file FacilityTypes.XML with a SLEW of new options. It allows performing some seriously radical things with Facilities. It includes all sorts of strategic modifiers, performance modifiers, and even verious risks and benefits associated with facilities that may or may not trigger on an hourly basis. The range of possible things you can do with facilities has increased a dozen-fold. In addition, HAM 3.6 changes the way we interact with facilities. To activate facilities and use their awesome benefits, a new sub-menu has been added to the character assignment menu. You can choose which facility to activate, and which of the facility's features you wish to use! This works just the same way as normal assignments (like Repair or Doctor), but makes sure the program knows when (and when NOT) to use a facility for any given task. In fact, HAM 3.6 has close to 20 facilities already useable, with various and exciting effects attached to each of them. Once HAM 3.6 is integrated into JA2 1.13, this will become the new official way of handling facilities, replacing all previous methods. In fact, some modders have already created several new facilities that are completely unique to their campaigns! Hopefully, many more will follow in the future. INI Settings See Also XML Facility Modifiers Category:Features Category:Strategic Features Category:HAM Facilities